I’d been thinking about a passage in Ian Morgan Cron’s stunning 2011 memoir, “Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me“, off and on when I hunted the book down on my shelves on Friday night. A friend was coming over and it promised to be an evening of great conversation, as it always is when she and I are together, and I wanted to share the passage I’d be thinking about with her.
I want to share just the smallest portion of that passage with you. Only about a page from a multi-page piece, describing the preparation for and misadventures leading up to Cron’s first holy communion. The last portion, actually. I feel a bit like I’m ruining a delightful joke by telling you the punchline first, but I assure you that the entirety of the passage, and indeed, the book, is worth reading, or better yet, getting on audiobook, so that you can hear Cron himself read it to you.
After a wild lead-up to this moment, Cron is in line to receive his first communion from the bishop, at a chapel with a giant image of the Virgin Mary at the front, and he is teary from the weight and gravity of the moment. He writes:
It wasn’t until I was within four or five kids of the bishop that I could really see his face. He was corpulent, his cheeks and jowls glazed with perspiration, and he was lightly wheezing like Kip Merriweather, a kid in our class who had asthma. The bishop looked like he would have paid a hundred bucks to get out of his clericals, go home, put his tired feet up, pop open a Pabst Blue Ribbon, and watch a Notre Dame basketball game. As I stepped forward and stood before him, he saw the tears running down my face. For an instant, his pasty white face softened, his eyes sparkled just like the Virgin Mary’s, and the corners of his mouth turned upward in a smile of deep knowing. I suspect he knew that I was one of those strange kids who “got it” – who was hungry and thirsty for God, who longed to be full. Maybe he’d been one of those weird kids too. He placed the Host on my tongue and put his hand on the side of my face, his fat thumb briefly massaging my temple, a gesture of blessing I did not see him offer to any of my other classmates. And I fell into God.
I have spent forty years living the result of that moment.
I am told that, in years past, when a blizzard hit the Great Plains, farmers would sometimes tie one end of a rope to the back door of their farmhouses and the other around their waists as a precaution before going out to the barn to tend to the animals. They knew the stories of farmers who, on the way back to the house from the barn in a whiteout, had become disoriented and couldn’t find their way back home. They would wander off, and their half-frozen bodies wouldn’t be found until spring, when the snow had melted.
That day, Bishop Dalrymple, sweat dripping from the end of his bulbous nose, tied a rope around my waist that was long and enduring. How did he know the number of times that I would stretch that rope to its breaking point or how often I would drift onto the plains in a whiteout and need a way to find my way back home?
Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me, Ian Morgan Cron, 2011, pgs. 44-45
I am so struck by that image of the invisible rope, fixed around a young boy’s waist, pulling him ever back into the depths of faith. I feel the image viscerally, because I know that same rope. Mine was fixed around my waist around age 11 or 12, the first time I received communion as a protestant, sitting in a pew on the left side of the sanctuary, in the old campus of Center Street Church here in Calgary, on a snowy Good Friday. It was strengthened nine years ago when I received my first holy communion as a Catholic, in the front of St. Michael’s parish, from a visiting priest, at the end of a lengthy Easter Vigil mass.
I was thinking about this passage before my friend came over on Friday because I feel the tug of that rope still today. Sometimes it has felt like a noose, sometimes a welcome life-rope, but always it is there.
I find myself again in a season of sorting out my life of faith. Evaluating where and when I fit in the larger body of Christ. Questioning all sorts of things that will make for other posts at other times, I’m sure. But that rope tied on at the Eucharistic table of both of the Christian traditions that have been part of my life; that rope that I would argue my parents tied first when they named me with a name that means “consecrated to God, a Christian” speaking over their newborn daughter their hopes for her life – that rope is one I’m clinging to right now, even as I sort and evaluate and cull. Because walking away isn’t an option, only walking deeper, further, more fully into God.
Lisa From Canada 